Again and again his music re-echoes the cry, "I will not
let Thee go unless Thou bless me." Of modern composers Bruckner alone
had affair so steadily with the heights, and Franck is the gentler,
sweeter, tenderer of the two. He set himself, quite in the fashion of
the composers of the dying renaissance, to write an hundred hymns to the
Virgin. He sought in his piano compositions to recapture the lofty,
spiritual tone, the religious communion that informed the works of Bach.
Only once, in the "Variations Symphoniques," is he brilliant and
virtuosic, and then, with what disarming naivete and joyousness!
Oftentimes it is the gray and lonely air of the organ-loft at St.
Clothilde, the church where he played so many melancholy years, that
breathes through his work. Alone with his instrument and the clouded
skies, he pours out his sadness, his bitterness, strives for
resignation. Or, his music is a bridge from the turmoiled present to
some rarer, larger, better plane. In symphony and quartet, in sonata and
oratorio, he attains it. The hellish brood is scattered; the great bells
of faith swing bravely out once more; the world is full of Sabbath
sunshine and pied with simple field-flowers. And he goes forth through
it released and blessed and joyous, and light and glad of heart.
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